Layers of Fear: Inheritance is a DLC that has us returning to the mansion and kicks off after the story of the base game. As such, spoilers are inevitable, so if you have not played the base title yet, I’d advice against reading any further. With that being said, we are no longer the mad artist. Instead, we play as his daughter as she returns to this dreaded house that holds nothing but bad memories in search of some closure. Immediately after entering the mansion, we will notice that the once well-adorned halls are now in a state of extreme disrepair after so many years of being left unattended. No longer does the environment twist, turn and mess with your head, now we are greeted with nothing but an eerie silence and a cold stillness among the rubble.
Our nameless character is much chattier than our previous protagonist as well and will constantly remark on events. She also wields a flashlight that will strangely never be of any use to us throughout the game. You see, the mansion acts as a hub-world of sorts this time around and each room triggers a memory which we must play through. Triggering a memory will either change the environments around you or transport you back to your childhood in a manner just as trippy as anything out of the original game. Unlike it, however, this DLC does not focus on horror even though it is at times unsettling. The story serves to get you to feel for the tragedies and flaws of our character’s family. While the base title has us witnessing the horrors that goes inside of the mind of a madman, this instead gives us a glimpse of the sadness that comes from re-exploring memories of a terrible childhood.
Gameplay remains the same for the most part. We still interact with shelves, drawers, and anything that could be hiding something of use. The only difference comes in the sections in where we play as a child, to whom every object appears to be gigantic. For some reason, during these sections, we have a really messed up field of view. Seriously, it is as if she was a cyclops or part goldfish when she was a kid with how headache-inducing the effect to make everything appear larger is. There are some pseudo platforming sections during these sequences as well where we must find some way to grab something off a table or some other task that would have been inconsequential while being a full grown adult. We still lack the ability to jump though there are convenient platforms placed around for us to reach our destination with relative ease.
The feeling of this title being a mere walking sim is reduced with the inclusion of frequently having tasks for us to accomplish and a clear goal in exploring the entire mansion. These for better or worse make it feel more like a first-person Hidden Object/Adventure game as we seek seemingly insignificant items and rub them against something else in hopes of progress. All in all, the experience will last you less than an hour but has multiple endings to see, for added replay value. It is an interesting DLC that tries to bring something different to the table instead of being more of the same, with varying degrees of success. If you enjoyed the base game, this will bring some closure to the story and exploring familiar environments from a new perspective is quite fun. Inheritance loses something from its transition from horror to a more story-focused approach yet it remains a tale well worth seeing through to the end for fans of the original.
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